A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  The question why ecclesiastical histories were rarely composed in the West is difficult to answer. Lack of interest can hardly be the answer, as there is plenty of evidence for circulation of Rufinus and, later, the Historia tripartita. Things might have been different if an authority such as Jerome had actually composed his projected church history (Life of Malchus 1). Instead, Jerome’s chronicle turned chronicle writing into the preferred historiographical medium in Latin. Indeed, even the narrative history of Sulpicius Severus assimilates itself to that genre with its title, Chronica. If one sees ecclesiastical history as essentially a genre of controversy, that is, as a genre that reflects defense of orthodoxy, the greater doctrinal uniformity of the West may be another reason why it was little practiced – even if the argument would entail that Donatism should have been an impulse to writing church history in Africa. Finally, it has been suggested that Rome sought to legitimize itself by focusing on its foundation by St. Peter and, hence, did not submit itself to historical narrative (Kany 2007, p. 576; Blaudeau 2016, p. 129). Serial biography, as found in the Liber pontificalis, focused on the individual personality of each bishop and the way he preserved the heritage of St. Peter. At any rate, with the center offering no impulse, the genre was condemned to marginality.

  With Greek, Syriac is the language in which most ecclesiastical histories are written. The genre was first received through translations from the Greek. In particular, Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History was translated already by the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. Socrates was translated too, by the end of the sixth century at the latest. Historiography directly written in Syriac started in that same century. The first ecclesiastical history is Pseudo‐Zachariah, a compilation of a Syriac translation of Zachariah Scholasticus, a continuation until 560, and some texts on earlier history, even if it is uncertain if its original title was, indeed, Ecclesiastical History (568/569). At the end of the sixth century, church history was clearly popular: John of Ephesus finished his tripartite work ca. 589; there is the somewhat mysterious John called Glybo, who may have written under or just after Justinian I. In the eight and ninth centuries, we know of a group of historians from Edessa, including Theophilus of Edessa, Daniel of Tur Abdin, and Theodosius of Tell‐Mahre. Edessa was an important place of culture, but our perspective is distorted, as these authors are all known through Dionysius of Tell‐Mahre (patriarch 818–845), author of a chronicle and himself from Edessa (see, in general, Debié 2009, 2015). Dionysius himself divided his chronicle into two parts, an ecclesiastical and a secular one. This innovation permitted the integration into narrative history of church history and secular history, an integration that in practice had already existed in chronicles. The format was adopted by the famous chronicles of Syriac renaissance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  All the works just referred to are West Syrian – that is, Miaphysite. It is likely that the output of ecclesiastical history was spurred by the progressive institutionalization of that church in this period, generating a need to distinguish oneself from the Chalcedonian Church. It has been traditional to argue that the East Syrians (so‐called Nestorians) developed a different type of historiography, in that they did not adopt the traditional forms of chronicle writing and ecclesiastical historiography. Instead, their histories tend to be biographical, individual, or serial (Debié 2010). This view needs to be reconsidered. If the sixth‐century work History of the Holy Fathers Persecuted for the Truth by Barhadbesabba d‐Bet‐‘Arbaye (after 569) is indeed biographical in nature and is only later called a church history, it represents a format of martyrological stories that is known in all traditions. Serial biography, as represented in the History of Arbela (twenty‐one biographies of the bishops of Arbela, after 544) was also known in the other traditions. More importantly, there is extensive evidence for ecclesiastical histories written by East Syrians in the seventh century, even if it is all fragmentary in nature: Alaha‐Zekha (early seventh century); Micah of Beth Garmai; Gregory of Kaskar (early‐middle seventh century); Meshiha Zekha (seventh century); Daniel Bar Maryam (middle of seventh century); Elias of Merw (seventh century). This continued into the 8th century with Bar Sahde (seventh to eighth century), Gregory of Shuster (eighth century), Simon Bar‐Tabahe (middle of eighth century), Theodore bar Koni (end of eighth century), and, somewhat later in the ninth century, a certain Pethyon. If some of these works are cited by later authors for biographical information and therefore may have had a biographical order (such as Elias of Merw and Pethyon), others are clearly chronological and narrative in nature (Daniel Bar Maryam, Bar Sahde, and Simon of Bar‐Tabahe). Indeed, some of these narratives went back quite a bit in time. Bar Sahde covered at least the post‐Chalcedonian period, and Simon wrote against Chalcedon and thus probably started there too. Daniel Bar Maryam, in turn, started with Christ. This flurry can be understood as a response to the rise of the West Syrian Church at the end of the sixth century, which encroached on the eastern territories where the East Syrians had been living. The East Syrians felt compelled to respond to the concomitant rise in ecclesiastical histories on the West Syrian side. Another impulse may have been the conquest of the Persian Empire (where the East Syrians lived) by Islamic forces and the need to define one’s own position in that new context: Self‐definition became important in a context where one was being defined by new powers (see Fiey 1970, pp. 113–143). In the shifting sands of political history of the seventh century, history may have been as much a response to the rise of Islam as to an apocalypse.

  Literary genres are shaped by tradition, in that authors follow earlier models and seek to imitate and emulate them. In that sense, Eusebius is, indeed, the founding father of the genre: His work was the impetus for the various traditions just surveyed. Imitation was never slavish; as we have seen, the genre was enriched with many forms that deviated from the Eusebian model. At the same time, the writing of church history was influenced by particular circumstances, which could be as varied as the desire to participate in controversy and the wish to celebrate the end of controversy. The genre was rooted in social reality in yet another way: It can be understood as one particular form of the social self‐affirmation of religious groups. Hence, the creation of ecclesiastical history by Eusebius is a testament both to the increased institutionalization of the church and to his will to display the life of the church to a wider audience. The genre was strong in periods when West Syrians and East Syrians needed to establish their own identity vis‐à‐vis each other, the Byzantine Chalcedonian Church, and Islam. It disappears in the Byzantine Empire when the Church identifies fully with the state, but it is reinvented by Bede when he seeks to define the English in ecclesiastical terms. It will return to the front stage of Western literary history during the debates between Catholics and Protestants in the early modern period.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. 313153 and from the Flemish Research Fund.

  REFERENCES

  Editions and bibliographies for all the authors mentioned can be found in the database available at http://www.late‐antique‐historiography.ugent.be/database; see also Van Hoof, Lieve and Peter Van Nuffelen, ed. 2018. Clavis Historicorum Tardae Antiquitatis, Turnhout: Brepols. Syriac authors can also be accessed via Debié 2015.

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  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Chronicles

  R.W. Burgess

  11.1 Introduction

  One of the most distinctive and complex literary forms of late antiquity is that of chronicles. The chronology of the West in the fifth century is impossible without them, and for the entire empire from the beginning of the fourth to the first quarter of the seventh century they are invaluable and unequaled chronological and historical sources. And yet most historians know little or nothing about them, individually or as a genre, and find them extremely difficult to work with, not least because of the peculiar nature of Theodor Mommsen’s editions and the lack of modern scholarship. Scholars of other late antique disciplines have for the most part simply ignored them. To make matters worse, the term “chronicle” can signify quite different things to scholars of different disciplines. So the topic is either a minefield or a quagmire, depending on how one wishes to look at it. Given this state of affairs, it will be most useful in the limited space of this chapter to provide a basic guide to the major late antique chronicles with a helpful bibliography. For everything else, as well as for the background to what appears here, I refer the reader to the first and, eventually, later volumes of Mosaics of Time (Burgess and Kulikowski 2013).

  What must be made clear first, however, is the definition of “chronicle” employed here (see Burgess and Kulikowski 2013, pp. 1–62), since I shall not be discussing many of the works usually called or considered chronicles. A chronicle is a work in which the author considers the placing of events over a long period of time within their correct annalistic and chronological context to be of paramount importance. Consequently, each year is set out explicitly and distinctly from those before and after. Because of the wide chronological coverage brevity becomes the second defining characteristic. Tied to this need for brevity is the lack or minimal appearance of narrative intrusion, and so chronicles often have the appearance of anonymous repositories of facts with no explicit narrator to guide the reader, make didactic comments, or explain the causes, meanings, or lessons of events and actions. This brevity and the general lack of a narrative guide result in a paratactic structure that appears to coordinate or correlat
e unrelated events of vastly differing importance and that can also fail to make explicit important connections between and among a series of events. Chronicles so defined stretch for over three and a half thousand years, from the beginning of the second millennium BCE in Assyria and Babylonia to the modern period, the longest unbroken tradition of any historical genre in Western literature.

  11.2 Consularia

  Consularia are a subgenre of chronicles, and the earliest surviving late antique chronicles are the consularia of the fourth century. (This discounts the Greek chronicles of the third century that survive on papyrus [Burgess and Kulikowski 2013, pp. 90, 121, 313–315], which are simply copies and continuations of earlier Hellenistic chronicles and not products that are recognizably “late antique.”) For the most part the consularia divide into two completely independent traditions: those related to the Descriptio Consulum and those related to the Consularia Italica. Of these, the former is the earliest.

  Late antique consularia derive from the same tradition as the Latin epigraphic fasti and consularia of the early empire, most particularly the famous Fasti Ostienses. The near identical nature of both the earlier and the later texts shows that, in spite of the absence of evidence for consularia for more than one hundred years into the third century, from the end of the Fasti Ostienses to the beginning of the Descriptio Consulum, there must have been a continuous tradition of consularia from the reign of Augustus right through to the beginning of the seventh century (Burgess and Kulikowski 2013, pp. 35–57, 133–184).